How can we make Microsoft Teams better?

Support for Private Channels

Looking for the ability to create a channel that only channel members can see. Private channels are available in slack. There is an admin for private channels who is the creator, and they are the ones who add/remove users.

Five types of public/privacy that is being asked for by users:

- Public-Open (visible anywhere including outside the org and anyone can join)
- Public-Invitation (visible anywhere including outside the org, must be invited)
- Company-Open (only visible inside the org and anyone in the org can join; outside the org must be invited)
- Company-Invitation (only visible inside the org, must be invited)
- Secret (invisible to everyone except existing members, must be invited)

Hey guys, guess who’s back from maternity leave? Your favorite Teams PM, Suphatra! I’ve been back for a few weeks and catching up on where we’re at in Engineering.

Private channels is still actively in development, and I am hoping I’ll be given clearance to share with you some more details. What would be great is if you can post in this thread any specific questions you have about the feature, besides just an inquiry on the release date.

No big updates to share, but the feedback has been a huge help. So thank you all once again. As more details emerge from the feature team on the work being done, I will be sure to share it with you here.

We understand how important this ask is to you all and we are working to ensure it is implemented in a fashion that will meet your expectations.

Its been a while since my last update, so wanted to check in and let you know that this is well under way. We’re aiming for early next calendar year (2018) if development and testing go well. I’ll ping you again with a more exact ETA after the new year.

Meanwhile, feel free to ping me on Twitter at @skprufo if you have any questions!

We’ve got lots of resources on this and we’re actively working on it. This is a top priority feature.

I haven’t gotten a firm ETA from the team but I can say this won’t hit in the next month or so. Its a complicated feature, so it will take longer than that. I’ll let you know once I get a general date from them.

Thanks for your feedback, patience, and as always, thank you for your support of Teams.

I’m really excited to share with you the progress on this feature. To recap, we originally tried to resolve for this request by giving you Private Teams, but your feedback showed us that this was not the right solution. So we’ve gone back to the drawing board and we are in active development of private channels.

This is how we view a private channel: it will be a new channel type that allows users to create a channel with a different user roster than the parent team, that is only visible to those members. As the name implies, it is meant for sensitive discussions or for working with sub-teams.

As it turns out, private channels is a very complicated feature to deploy, because there are several dependencies external to Teams. I will keep you updated as we progress, and if you have any questions, please always feel welcome to email me directly at sparavi @ Microsoft (dot) com.

I just wanted to write and let you know that I updated the idea to better reflect the vibrant discussion in the community about exactly what a private channel means. It looks like there are five definitions — shout out to user John Black who wrote it out so elegantly. I’ve included that description in the original idea.

We still have this item under review, and I’m personally interested in seeing if this request is further changed when we release guest access (coming super soon!) this summer. Stay tuned, stay cool, and as always, thanks for your support of Teams.

So a little bit of context for everyone who newly voted for this feature.

When you first asked for “Private Channels” we believed this could be solved by the new feature that we recently rolled out — the ability to create either Public or Private teams. Hence, the status on this item was “Working on it!”

However, the strong feedback from the community has been that this does not solve your original problem. So, we’re pulling this into review and evaluating ways we can implement this. It’s not an easy fix, so we’ll need some time. I’ll make sure to update you along the way.

Thanks and please continue to give us your great feedback. Your voice helps guide this product in the right direction!

The discussion comes this feature now or not is now stretching over more than 18 months. Since then, IT and business strategists have been trying to position teams within the company, and the function most in demand by the companies that use teams is the private channel. New functions that are valuable and well received are coming all the time, but the most popular function is still missing. What's really devastating is that we're being held out from a communications perspective and losing acceptance in the company. That can't and shouldn't be in Microsoft's interest! A clear statement is necessary!

As a customer having many external consultants in and out of projects, this is preventing us from using Teams effectively. Creating new dedicated team sites instead of channels makes it **** to administer. So highly sought after to be able to limit access for externals to channels.

In my opinion when this starts to be developed we cannot separate access between Team Channels and SharePoint folders.

Since each channel creates a SharePoint folder as well it should inherit the permissions of SharePoint access there. Otherwise it will create a big mess on who can access what and just need double the work from admins.

I have a big issue with Teams. I would like to use it even for appraisals and any private communication but have found it completely an unviable option. I think I would probably need to evaluate slack and see if it makes more sense. Unless we have a timeline by which this would be provided, it will be greatly difficult to think of this as a public-public and private-private collaboration tool.

Embarrassing isn’t it when you evangelise this product and your colleagues think you are the idiot for promoting it, thinking of ideas for adoption, making people send a teams chat instead of an email, moan when they don’t, and keep ******* on about how really good it will be, and you get stonewalled by the company you are trying to get adopted. I am a real jerk, obviously.

Any update?? we don't know anything since the status "needs your feedback" was set 2-3 months ago... users keep asking for this and it is a clear disadvantage MSO has and slack does have it!! Even if it wont be done soon an update will be much appreciate by all of us who are leading and driving the MS TEAMS ADOPTION in organizations!

The last update from Suphatra is the offer of the survey 2 months ago. From that point just "we are working on it". ON WHAT are your working regarding the survey?
I dont get your communication strategy at this point of requests.

I have been creating NEW teams just to enable this type of functionality. This completely destroys the idea of using Teams in the first place. What I need is the ability to have a team where a large group (division wide) can share information. Then within that team be able to have a channel with specific permissions for sensitive information. This would solve the problem with Power BI workspaces and the problem of having reports and datasets in a single workspace. It is just something we really, really need or we have to start looking for alternatives.